Set up and use tracing
Along with metrics and logs, tracing is one of the three pillars of modern observability. Tracing is a way to track a single request and log that single request as it crosses through all of the services in your infrastructure.
This video explains how to add data sources, including Loki, Tempo, and Mimir, to Grafana and Grafana Cloud. Tempo data source set up starts at 4:58 in the video.
How to send traces
To send traces to Grafana Cloud Traces, you need a running Grafana Agent instance or an OpenTelemetry Collector instance in your environment.
Caution
Grafana Alloy is the new name for our distribution of the OTel collector. Grafana Agent has been deprecated and is in Long-Term Support (LTS) through October 31, 2025. Grafana Agent will reach an End-of-Life (EOL) on November 1, 2025. Read more about why we recommend migrating to Grafana Alloy.
In the configuration section of Grafana Agent, set the following fields:
traces:
configs:
- name: default
receivers: # enable the receivers that you need
# if your app sends traces via Jaeger
jaeger:
protocols:
thrift_http:
thrift_compact:
# if your app uses the OpenTelemetry protocol (OTLP) to send traces
otlp:
protocols:
grpc:
http:
remote_write:
- endpoint: <Your Traces instance remote_write endpoint>
basic_auth:
username: <Your Traces instance ID>
password: <Your Cloud Access Policy token>
For the remote_write
section, your endpoint
, username
, and password
are all located in Grafana Cloud Portal at Grafana.com.
To locate this information:
- Select your organization from the Organization drop-down.
- Select Details on the Tempo tile.
- Locate the Grafana Data Source settings.
For a more detailed procedure, refer to Set up Grafana Cloud Traces using Grafana Agent.
For general information about using Grafana Agent for traces, refer to the Tempo documentation for Grafana Agent. For the full list of configuration options, refer to Grafana Agent traces configuration options.
If you would like to use the OpenTelemetry Collector to send traces to Grafana Cloud, check out this blog post that explains how to do so in detail.
If you’d like to use OTEL with Kubernetes, refer to Ship Kubernetes OTEL traces using Grafana Agent.
Documentation
For additional information, refer to the Tempo documentation links below.
- Metrics-generator to generate metrics from incoming tracing data.
- Tempo API documentation for the different ingestion formats supported and the query API.